Chinese mobile phone users were hit by about 100 billion spam messages last year

Mobile phone users in China are having a tough time dealing with spammers.

China Daily reports that nearly one hundred billion spam messages were sent to Chinese mobile phones in 2011.

Of these spam texts, more than 10 billion were intercepted by the security software for 70 million users.

Cell phone users received 11.4 unwanted messages each week, on an average, according to a survey released by Internet Society of China, with fraudulent messages topping the list of these spams. Approx. 65.2 percent of mobile phone users received false messages saying they had won a prize; 47.1 percent received messages promoting fake bills and 46.6 percent received messages pretending to be from the bank.

Most of the mobile phone users blame the telecom operators for continued spam messages. According to the China Spam Trends ReportQ2 2011 released by the Internet Society of China’s anti-spam committee in August, 2011, the average number of spam messages that Chinese mobile phone users received each week rose from 12 percent in the first half of 2010 to 13 in the first half of 2013.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is planning to launch a three month campaign to screen group delivery services that send spam messages and pressurize mobile phone operators to strengthen their spam filtering systems.